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12 June 2008

What's going on with the San Francisco SPCA?

I've been working on a story about the abrupt closing of the San Francisco SPCA's Hearing Dog Program, and the more I dig into it, the less I understand what's happening at what was once the best and brightest shelter in the country.

SF Weekly is reporting that the SF SPCA, which is a private shelter that does not do animal control, has all but abandoned its "no kill" mission -- the same mission that once made it one of the richest shelters in the country, due to huge donor support -- and has implemented new guidelines making it easier for its staff to kill pets with borderline and treatable health and behavior problems. The described two animals recently killed at the shelter, a six-month-old puppy named Isaac, and a feral kitten named Tulane, who started out his life at the SF SPCA and was adopted into a home:

Tulane appeared to be a good adoption candidate, according to his medical log. Volunteers reported he enjoyed having his head petted, and purred contentedly when sitting in their laps.

The person who adopted Tulane already had a domesticated cat the kitten got along with. But Tulane never formed a bond with his adopter. On May 2, more than a year after the adoption, that person returned a very different cat to the SF/SPCA. Now 18 months old, Tulane demonstrated fearful and aggressive behavior and was categorized as "completely feral," according to the log. He was put in a cage where he ran in tight circles, knocking over his food bowl. Veterinary staff assumed the spilled food meant Tulane wasn't eating, even though at least two employees say there was fresh crap in his litter box.

The SF/SPCA's feral team was making plans to return Tulane to a managed feral colony where they thought he would be happier and would likely eat better. But before arrangements were made, veterinary staff decided, without a full medical examination, that the cat's failure to eat was a symptom of a serious condition. Tulane was euthanized.

Why the big rush, that the paper says cost Isaac, Tulane, and other animals their lives?

The reason for the new euthanasia policies is, in part, money. The SF/SPCA is scrambling to find funding to complete its controversial $30 million, for-profit animal hospital, the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center. The project is only half complete, and with the looming specter of hiring staff, new equipment costs, and opening expenses, there has been an emphasis on saving money around the shelter, where it costs an estimated $43 a day to house a healthy cat. Since president Jan McHugh-Smith was hired a year ago, she has scaled back or eliminated internationally known behavior and medical services that had saved thousands of animals over the years.

Employees and volunteers were alarmed at the recent closure of the 30-year-old Hearing Dog Program, along with major changes to adoption policies, cutbacks to the Cat Behavior Program, and the loss of the volunteer Affection Eaters program, which might have been able to help Tulane.

The cutbacks and new policies have caused at least seven staffers to quit, as well as an uncertain number of volunteers. Some of them have organized into two groups who are vowing to expose the new policies even if it means that donors, the lifeblood of the nonprofit, stop cutting checks.

And it's not only the legendary Hearing Dog Program that's been shut down:

McHugh-Smith has also made controversial changes to the Cat Behavior Program. Longtime SF/SPCA cat behaviorists Dilara Parry and Mikel Delgado, who were the most prominent standard-bearers of the now-defunct no-kill policies, gave their notice in April, claiming management had been continually undermining them. And, Delgado says, there had been a shift in the policy that every treatable animal should be given a chance at adoption.

"The cat behavior staff had to struggle to keep this program together, especially over the last year," says Delgado, who is a certified cat behavior consultant. "This was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting."

Management made it clear that less time and money would be spent on marginal animals, Delgado says, and services were vanishing. The volunteer-run Affection Eaters program, which helped traumatized cats regain their appetites in the shelter, quietly disappeared.

The SF Weekly piece is painful reading for someone, like me, who was involved with the shelter in the early days of its no-kill transition under the guidance of then-director Richard Avanzino, now the head of Maddie's Fund, a national organization dedicated to funding community efforts to become no-kill.

I have a series of interviews with people involved with the story set up over the next few days, and am not really sure where this will go, but the SF Weekly report clearly lays the blame at the feet of the SPCA staff who are hellbent on pushing through the hospital project, now careening widly over-budget.

Comments

This is a disgrace! Doners should let their voices be heard. The best thing would be if e some of the former emplyees could form their own rescue group and do it the right way. Then the SPCA can run their for profit hospital and the donations can go to actually help the animals.

It appears that Canine Companions for Independence of Santa Rosa has entered into an "alliance" with the SF/SPCA regarding the Hearing Dog program. CCI will now accept the applicants from the individuals who were on the SF/SPCA Hearing Dog list.

Sniff..sniff...do I smell the stench of ARs permeating the SF SPCA? When I see valuable and popular programs being cut like this and animals being euthanised for spurious reasons, I have to wonder if the real agenda isn't that money's tight, but that programs which actually benefit the animals are contrary to the avowed goal of permanent severance of the alliance between Homo sapiens and all other species, and therefore Have To Go?!

The "animal rights" vs. "animal welfare" debate is simplistic and easily exploited by groups that use "animal welfare" to defend horrid abuse practices because they say if you don't accept puppy mills and factory farming you must be "animal rights," choosing animals over people, against pets, a pawn of PETA, etc., etc.

It's the ol' "yur with us or agin' us" crap, blue state vs. red, wedges of division to distract us from real issues, etc.

Many thoughtful people refuse to be pigeonholed and marginalized into one camp or another.

Just a point. More charities have been hijacked by a corporate bottom line mentality, the greed of their hired bureaucrats, and the inertia of entrenched interests with sinecures to protect than have been waylaid by political extremism.

Red Cross, anyone? United Way? Lotta money pouring into those troughs -- are we shocked when the pigs show up? (Sorry pigs. No slam on pigs intended.)

I've more or less given up on really big charities. And when the hired executives start coming from the corporate world, or the generic corporate "non-profit" world (not the trenches of whatever mission the charity claims as its own) and drawing six-figure salaries, that's a good cue to find another charity to take your money. (When the BoD justifies some obscene salary for some greasy suit because "non-profits have to compete with the corporate world" -- great time to button your purse.)

Would PeTA *like* to control the policies of the SFSPCA and every shelter in the country? Sure. But they are not as powerful as plain greed and the brainless momentum of an organization whose "mission" has devolved to "bring in more money for salaries."

The final insult to Hearing Dog supporters came when it was discovered that the SF/SPCA board of directors had given McHugh-Smith a $500,000 low-interest loan to help her purchase a home in Marin. Such loans are common at prestigious nonprofits, but nonetheless it made the firing of the Hearing Dog employees and other service cutbacks harder to take.

I can talk a little about this, as I'm a former SPCA volunteer who's working to help get the SPCA back on track. Basically, it seems like the new pet hospital has become all-consuming for the board of the SPCA and therefore for the new president they hired and the new vice-president she hired. They're taking the easy cases and trying not to deal with the hard ones. They're minimizing the amount of time and money they have to spend on difficult animals (sick, behavior problems) and trying to bring in lots of easy-to-adopt animals to get their numbers and money up and to keep costs down. A whole bunch of concerned citizens are working right now to help San Francisco do what it can to encourage the SPCA to get back to helping find homes for all homeless animals in San Francisco, not just the easy ones. There seems to be some good community support as well as some support from leaders in City Hall. It's not likely to be easy, since the SPCA is a private organization, but we're not giving up hope! The attention from the SF Weekly story seems like it may be helping to change things - it's a good first step.

I was very concerned when I heard that Hugh-Smith was hired out of Colorada into

San Fran SPCA from a kill shelter to no kill. The board failed to do their homework on this one. It is a shame that she is ruining one of the flag ship no kill success stories in the country but she is a hanger on of H$U$ and AHA both over funded and kill happy groups. McHugh Smith was involverd in writting the rather useless and pro kill shelter Asilomar Accords.

"From No-Kill Solutions"

“In August of 2004, a group of animal welfare industry leaders from across the nation convened at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California"

“The mission of those involved in creating the Asilomar Accords is to work together to save the lives of all healthy and treatable dogs and cats.” (Asilomar Accords, Guiding Principles, 1.)

The Asilomar Accords, in fact, do not present a roadmap for saving lives. Instead, they allow—and even legitimize—rounding up and killing feral cats, refusing rescue groups and No Kill shelters access to animals facing death in their facility, and enforcing draconian animal control laws. The Accords even appear to call for the phase-out of the term “No Kill” or “No Kill Shelter.” In return, traditional shelters promise to provide transparency and openness by providing statistics to the public—based on a reporting model that is neither transparent nor an accurate representation of life and death in a traditional animal shelter.

Does the road to No Kill lead through Asilomar? It does not.

It is very obvious that the board failed to do thier homework. What a shame !!!

On "leadership" vs. "trenches": I believe a scary situation develops when you let everyone come "up from the trenches." You end up with a deficiency in training that leaves a big, fat gap for an uncaring raptor outsider to leap in through. There needs to be a mix, all the way up, of "mission" people and more "professionally identified" people. It is the latter people who are best equipped to develop useful critiques. If EVERYONE comes up from the trenches, it is very hard to get away from "the way it's always been done."